Josephine Hobby - Licensed Conveyancer

I've spent months observing someone's professional behaviour and formed a fairly uncharitable view of her from it. I know I'm stereotyping beyond the evidence. Knowing that I'm doing it neither makes me stop nor makes the conveyancing process move any faster.

Her name is Josephine.

Josephine is not my solicitor. This is important because if she were my solicitor I could ring her up and say, Josephine, what the fuck are you doing?

Josephine is my buyers' solicitor, which means I cannot speak to her. I receive news of Josephine through intermediaries, rather like reports from a distant and not entirely friendly principality. My estate agent speaks to Josephine. My solicitor speaks to Josephine. Occasionally one of them reports back.

Josephine is looking at the file. Josephine thinks there probably isn't anything else. Josephine is going to look at the responses today. Josephine's client is coming in to sign on Tuesday.

Tuesday arrives.

My solicitor contacts Josephine and discovers that Josephine is just looking at the responses now.

This is where my charitable instincts have begun to fail.

I have been trying to sell this house for months. Josephine took approximately eight weeks to begin looking at the file at all and has since progressed through the conveyancing at approximately one enquiry per geological epoch.

There is always another enquiry, although not necessarily an unreasonable one. This is part of the problem. I would find it considerably easier to sustain my rage if she were asking whether the house had ever been occupied by a circus or demanding documentary evidence that the roof existed. Instead, she asks tiny conveyancing questions, singularly. More irritatingly, they are often related to the thing I have just answered, which raises the obvious question of why, when she was looking at that particular thing, she didn't ask all the questions about it at once.

I answer one. We wait. Another small question appears. I answer that.

It is conveyancing by instalment.

On Tuesday came a request for a plan of the drainage system. Nobody appears to know why. Indeed, I had just answered at length about septic tank compliance. There was no outstanding request for a plan. Josephine simply wanted one.

So I sent one.

This is dangerous knowledge because I know what needs to happen next. She needs to look at it. That's it. Open the attachment, look at the plan, observe drains, observe septic tank and close whatever mysterious circle required a drainage plan in the first place. Two minutes, possibly three if she makes tea.

And yet experience tells me that Josephine and my drainage plan may now enter a period of geological separation during which tectonic plates may shift and my new house may acquire coastal status. Eventually someone will chase her and Josephine will be just looking at it now.

The difficulty is that over these months I have constructed an increasingly elaborate Josephine from all this. I have never met her, which has not prevented me from developing opinions. Quite detailed opinions, actually.

Eventually, because apparently I have no remaining dignity, I Googled her.

This was a mistake.

There she was: photograph, professional biography, career history. Rather than puncturing the increasingly elaborate stereotype I had constructed, every available detail appeared to support it.

I know this is stereotyping. I know I am taking a collection of professional behaviours and extrapolating from them an entire human being. I know perfectly well that Josephine may have pressures and circumstances about which I know absolutely nothing.

This knowledge has had almost no effect whatsoever.

After months of this, the mind begins to fill in the gaps. I can see the breezy hand. The file will be looked at. Nothing to worry about. Probably nothing else. Tuesday. And then Tuesday comes and Josephine is just looking at the thing she was going to look at last Wednesday.

This is not bringing out the best in me. I'd prefer to be generous, nuanced, interested in the possibility that people contain multitudes.

Instead, I have reached: FFS Josephine.

I don't particularly like this version of myself, and not because Josephine needs my charitable thoughts. She is entirely unaware of them. I could spend the afternoon contemplating her complexity and humanity and it would make absolutely no difference to Josephine whatsoever.

It would also not make the fucking conveyancing move any faster.

And therein lies the really irritating part. I suspect Josephine has supplied the raw materials. I have merely undertaken some unauthorised construction.

Josephine Hobby is an invented name. Any resemblance between that name and an actual conveyancer is entirely coincidental. The events described are not.